Cock A Hoot: Leisure Suit Larry HD

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As Andrew mentions below, HD remakes serve to make games look like your rose-tinted, 1920×1080 memories of them. Trying to play through the original MDK2 now is a tough feat, so having it remade for modern, hi-def eyes is a splendid thing. But the original Leisure Suit Larry? That looks like a pile of pixels even in my most optimistic memory. EGM are reporting that Replay Games and Larry creator Al Lowe have the rights to the games and plan to give them new life. As well as start on some new adventures.

That’s most interesting, because it means that neither the defunct Sierra (now Activision) nor Codemasters will be producing any more terrible, terrible sequels without Lowe’s involvement. Sierra got High Voltage Software to create 2004’s despicable Magna Cum Laude (in which Larry’s nephew sexually molests mentally ill women), while Codies hired Team 17 in 2009 to look away from Worms for a few minutes to crap out the utterly dreadful Box Office Bust. It’s not as if Lowe’s Larry games were all masterpieces – in fact, it’s reasonably impressive that the ghastly post-millennial sequels managed to make the original six games seem respectable – but it’s hard not to remember them with fondness.

A certain type of fondness, that ignores the inherent sexism and shockingly bad jokes.

That first one, The Land Of The Lounge Lizards, was an excellent guilty pleasure of my youth. Literally feeling guilty, at age 11, when I really shouldn’t have been playing it (pressing Alt-X to skip past the age checking questions, if I remember rightly). It was a berserk game, existing during a time when Sierra’s adventures were primarily about avoiding incessant death. And in the first Larry, that death would arrive if you hadn’t finished the game in two hours, at which point Larry would commit suicide.

I’m guessing the remake will avoid that element.

Of course, it’s not the first time the game’s been remade. As was Sierra’s wont in the early 90s, it saw a 1991 remake which removed the original game’s text parser and put in the ubiquitous adventure gaming cursor. It went from this:

to this:

And it will be remade again in 2032. With LASERS.

Fortunately, Replay and Lowe don’t only intent to update the older games, but also start creating some new stories with the license. Lowe must be as happy as a pig in shit, to have his creation back. Let’s hope he still has the old, weird magic.

I worked on a remake+sequel of one of the space quest titles, half a decade ago, providing the environment art. Seems their website is now gone. link to web.archive.org Bit strange they never managed to finish it off after I moved on, we had about 25 screens done.

That chart is a nonsense.
SQ1, 2, and 3 are all excellent. They are some of the best AGI-era games Sierra released, not least becuase their frequent deaths were funny enough to go looking for, and usually relatively fair, with unwinnable situations either being kind of obvious, or turning fatal before too long. (Yes, you can end up losing the Star Generator plans, but you have to be careless or oblivious. They added a rather nasty one in the SCI remake with the magnet, mind…)

SQ4 is funny but it’s a big mish-mash mess, like they emptied out a bucket of unfinished seeds of ideas and just tried to stitch them together into a clip show.

SQ5 was very noticably lacking the involvement of one of the Two Guys (IIRC he was unhappy at having to leave text parsers behind, amongst other things), and while it’s OK the tone shifts towards the twee and it does sadly show the lacking budget—no voice acting for one.

SQ6 was a turd on a lollypop stick.

Edit: When’d you last play it, Richard? I did a replay a month or so ago, expecting hair-pulling agony because I’d forgotten most of it, only to be pleasantly suprised at how much it hints at you. For example, where you have to dive for the gem, Roger will comment on the water being deeper. If you’ve freed the little guy, he shows you the use of the berries. I remember the big-lipped alien causing us to have to go back a way when we played it the first time, but frankly that’s what we got for thinking “oh, well, that was harmless”.

Not that long ago (it was part of a retro piece) and I still absolutely hated it. Don’t find it funny (and I do generally like the SQ series), bits like the vine maze are just crimes against entertainment, the puzzles irritated me because I prefer the higher tech areas of the series, and generally just couldn’t wait to be done with it. It’s by far my least favourite of the series, though the section in Stellar’s stomach in SQ6 still tops out as my least favourite bit period.

Somewhat heretically though, and I know it’s heresy, my favourite is actually SQ5. It doesn’t have the cool (if largely underused) gimmick of SQ4, but focusing on Trek gave it much stronger tonal consistency than the others, and I really liked lots of the things it added – proper captaining of a ship, the developing relations with the crew, and the much more cranked up dramatic situations on the main planets. The lack of dead-ends and especially sadistic deaths didn’t hurt, though it was still fun to have a few.

Well, damning with faint praise, but at least you only have to weave through the vines once in each direction, unlike the many cliff paths that the Kings Quests will have you trekking up and down.

SQ5 would probably be a good candidate for a remake, if such is the way of things now, with SQ4-grade voicework added. And the writing tweaked up a bit, perhaps using a robot facsimilie of Scott Murphy carefully constructed out of sharp metal parts from the belly of a salvage ship.

They’re in the final stages with SQ2VGA (voice acting and bug zapping as far as I can gather), and they are also responsible for a rather good KQ3 remake. Once SQ2 is out of the way, hopefully they’ll be giving us a bit more info on Kingdom of Sorrow (An entirely new King’s Quest game!).

Hopefully they’ll give the option to either play with mouse interface OR parser interface. I always like the typing interface games better, it’s how I learned to type as fast and well as I do now and there was more of a “closeness” with the game somehow. Also, the comedy factor of spelling errors or hardcore swear words (“yeah, you would too!”) is just classic.

I love the tension of the old AGI system where you could be simultaneously fleeing horrors about to do unspeakable things to you (at a gentle walking pace, of course) while typing in “DROP BUCKET”, and using F3 to re-use bits of the previous line. SCI will do text (e.g. KQ4), but pauses while you type. Boo.

Almost a quarter of a century ago I pulled an all nighter in work just to finish a copy of Leisure suit Larry that someone had smuggled into the office It was the first “real” PC game I ever completed and I can directly attribute it to the slippery slope that led through Lucas Arts adventures, DOOM and my ongoing obsession with PC gaming.

That’s not the confession though.

The confession is that the PC I played the game on crashed irretrievably the next day and valuable work files were lost. I never admitted my late night exploits to my boss or colleagues, particularly when rumours later leaked out that some pirated copies of Leisure Suit Larry had a nasty worm which would damage PCs.

@Zepp, I am guessing from your question that you have never played the game. Despite its reputation for schoolboy humour the game was remarkably chaste. I don’t think there was any nudity but your “reward” for finishing the game was pixellated head an shoulders picture of a pretty girl. I do remember that if you indulged in a (humorously censored) bout of hanky panky with a prostitute your character caught the clap shortly afterwards and died.

I’m not sure you know what an ad-hom is, since I’m not making any comment on you, nor are you making any argument which I am trying to undermine via such commentary? Generalisation, yes; that generally (oho!) fits any single-sentence comment on a non-tiny subject!

It’s odd when i cringe at the thought that with the new remake the challenge may be blander, but that’s what happened with the VGA one and i love all about it. I never could bear with the parser(i keep screaming what are the available verbs and which the interactible items??? which is a lot like today’s key-toggling to highlight items). But, well, it was just a matter of interface, no? The core challenge is that of achieving all the points in a room lest getting stuck somehow later.

If they preserve such terrific challenge that requires thorough exploration and text reading, i doubt 3d can ruin the game in any way, just as the use of the SCI2 vga engine didn’t ruin it.

HD Leisure Suit Larry, OK. (Although it should come with an actual leisure suit for those who never knew the pleasure of wearing the abominable polyester things.)

HD Space Quest 1 and/or 2, fine.

HD Wing Commander 1 & 2, definitely yes.

HD Ultima Underworld 1 & 2, most emphatically yes.

The HD remake I’d most like to see, however, would be for the original System Shock. People need (yes, “need” I say) to be able to play this (preferably with a working WASD/mouselook) in a resolution that won’t make your eyes bleed in order to see what game design brilliance looks like. (Not perfection, just brilliance.)